Posts tagged taylorism

Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft is a book worth buying, marking up, and arguing with. As soon as I read the excerpt in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this spring, I knew I had to buy it—if only to see if the latent references to the work of Albert Borgmann were in fact made explicit and fleshed out in the full book. They are, and any book that brings Borgmann's critique of technology to a wider audience is a good thing. I'll be posting excerpts from Crawford this week, with some comments along the way, and a slightly more in-depth response of my own next week. Here he documents how modern managers sought to systematically remove the element of craft (and therefore expense) from what once could have been called the creation of cultural goods—but now is simply manufacturing.

The tenets of scientific management were given their first and frankest articulation by Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose Principles of Scientific Management was hugely influential in the early decades of the twentieth century. . . . Taylor writes, "The managers assume . . . the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae." Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now a work process. This process replaces what was previously an integral activity, rooted in craft tradition and experience, animated by the worker's own mental image of, and intention toward, the finished product. Thus, according to Taylor, "All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department. . . ." Once the cognitive aspects of the job are located in a separate management class, or better yet in a process that, once designed, requires no ongoing judgment or deliberation, skilled workers can be replaced with unskilled workers at a lower rate of pay. Taylor writes that the "full possibilities" of his system "will not have been realized until almost all of the machines in the shop are run by men who are of smaller caliber and attainments, and who are therefore cheaper than those required under the old system."